Editorials
How ‘The Persistence’ Uses Procedural Generation To Keep Its Horror Fresh
It’s a reasonable assumption to make that even some of the best horror films lose a little of their luster after the third or fourth viewing. Don’t get me wrong, the classics are just that – classics, but nothing can replicate the chills, the unsettling first-time frights or the rush of adrenaline that you get when experiencing those movies for the very first time.
As much as their silver-screen counterparts, horror efforts in the gaming realm can also too, find themselves similarly afflicted in this way, with the numerous jump scares and gore stuffed cut-cutscenes ascribing to the law of diminishing returns with every subsequent viewing. After all, there are only so many times you can take the head of the Baker family crashing through the walls at you in Resident Evil 7 before you kinda get a little numb to it all.
For me that’s quite a lot – for others, however, your mileage may vary.
Enter then The Persistence, a sterling first-person shooter effort for PSVR from British developer Firesprite, the game aims to disrupt the status quo a bit more than its contemporaries seem willing to. As the clone of a security officer on a ship that finds itself generously stuffed with a number of Event Horizon 2.0 style aberrations to avoid, the emphasis in The Persistence is very much on stealth and by proxy, not getting pounded into a fine red mist by said monstrosities.
Where The Persistence meaningfully differs itself from its genre peers, however, is in how it leverages procedural generation to keep its level layouts fresh. Every time you start a new playthrough, the ship’s structure rearranges its numerous deck modules into a random configuration which in turn has a direct impact on how to approach each attempt at the game.
Open plan areas in a previous playthrough that may have permitted wide creative latitude for concealment might well find themselves replaced by tighter affairs, where such opportunities for stealth are limited. Likewise, the numerous monsters that you’ll encounter throughout the ship also find themselves similarly shuffled around the place too – where there could have been a trivial foe on a previous playthrough, might now be supplanted by an indomitable enemy that completely changes your tactics and approach to the situation at hand.
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By embracing such mercurial design principles, The Persistence keeps not just the challenge fresh but the fear and the horror unfaded too – a miracle of sorts that more developers in this genre space should take notice of going forward. In The Persistence, every corner potentially holds some fresh terror, while the comforts of previously discovered safe areas to retreat to no longer exist.
With each playthrough the terror is reimagined anew and so too with it does that familiar fraying of the nerves and the pumping of adrenaline emerge start once again. Exacerbating the effect further is the fact that The Persistence is played out entirely within the realms of VR, meaning that each and every fright and pointedly, the anticipation of them, is far more keenly affecting than your underwear might like them to be.
In essence, procedural generation would seem to be a robust and evocative way to ensure that games which trade on horror, terror and fearful thrills can continue to do so for far longer than they would be otherwise able to. Tantalizingly, if one were to expand the concept beyond the boundaries of The Persistence, an already superbly judged hybrid of Dead Space and Alien Isolation, the mind boggles at how other entries in the genre might well benefit from the inclusion of such design.
Certainly, a version of the previously mentioned Alien Isolation which might include procedurally generated content would be a grandly pant-filling affair – albeit one that wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense when viewed within that game’s rigid narrative framework. Equally though, a Resident Evil title in the style of Resident Evil 7 with shifting map layouts and randomized enemy design could also succeed as well.
Like that force thing from Star Wars, however, there must be balance. While procedural generation is great at randomizing level design, monster types, locations and so on, overdoing it can result in a deeply impersonal experience. Worse still, this results in the realization that the game isn’t properly catering for the player or their feelings, which when you’re dealing with notions of horror and terror that literally feed off your own personal experience, is really quite the opposite of what you want as a player and a narrative participant.
In The Persistence, however, this is the never the case simply because its procedural design beats operate within a very well defined set of deftly considered parameters, ensuring that the constant sense of unease and the spectacle of its unrelenting terror are never diminished.
So yeah, more of this please developers.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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